Deafness After Acute Bacterial Meningitis

摘要

This report reads: SIR,-We read with interest your Jan 18 editorial on deafness after meningitis. In Egypt we have found hearing impairment to be the most common sequela of meningococcal meningitis; among 775 patients treated hearing was affected in 45 (5.8%), of whom 20 (2.4%) became completely and 25 (3.4%) partly deaf. Hearing did not improve in any of the patients during the six months of followup. In a recent series of 244-patients with acute bacterial meningitis, hearing impairment was found in 9(7.1%) of those with meningitis due to Neisseria meningitidis and in 2 (5.2%) of those with Streptococcus pneumoniae meningitis (table). Hearing impairment was not detected in any of the patients with Haemophilus influenzae meningitis; however, this may not represent the true incidence of hearing disorder in H influenzae meningitis because all the patients were children below the age of 3 years in whom full audiometric assessment for estimation of hearing level was practically impossible with the methods available to us. The use of aditory brain system responses (ABR) might have detected hearing loss in some of the children with H influenzae meningitis-indeed the lack of such highly specialised equipment in many developing countries probably explains the under-reporting of these problems. Since this is an educational handicap which is significantly underestimated, educators as well as clinicians should be altered to the high risk of hearing loss in children who have had bacterial meningitis.